


The Honourable Wounds of Combat

by drladybird



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect: Andromeda
Genre: Alien Culture, Alien Gender/Sexuality, Alien Mythology/Religion, Awkward Sexual Situations, Awkwardness, Crack, Embarrassment, Humor, I got bored with fanon alien genitals and made up my own, Implied/Referenced Sexual Harassment, Lexi T'Perro has no gender because I feel like it, M/M, Meta, Mordin style sex ed, Sexual Humor, Star Trek jokes, The Author Regrets Everything, The Talk, Worldbuilding, being an omni-attractive fanservice alien has downsides!, cw brief references to creepy porn and creepy fetishisation, cw minor penis injury, don't ingest, sexual orientation gets complicated when aliens are involved, xenophilia jokes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-13
Updated: 2019-01-13
Packaged: 2019-10-09 09:33:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17404436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drladybird/pseuds/drladybird
Summary: Lexi assumed the Tempest's crew was old enough not to need any more sex ed....Wrong, apparently. Scott, how the hell did you do that to yourself?





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So. Original trilogy had the Mordin sex ed scene. Andromeda has just as much opportunity to shag the aliens, but no sex ed. Noticed that, and started imagining Ryder injuring themself due to not knowing any better.  
> If you're wondering why I used a minor character rather than Vetra? She seems too sensible, and too experienced with interspecies sex, to make that sort of mistake.

Lexi knew Scott Ryder was a good kid. He was coping amazingly with the ghastly mess he’d fallen into. Crack shot, could get all sorts of grumpy aliens to like him, keen to learn as much as possible, even managed to stay cheerful while he was doing it. But wow, he injured himself in some truly idiotic ways. This wasn’t even the dumbest injury he’d had – Lexi had been far more shocked when he ate the delicious berries that were definitely edible _by krogan,_ or the time he’d picked up the brightly coloured fuzzy worm thing and gone “aww who’s an ickle fuzzy wormy” until it spat acid in his face – but really?

“Let me make sure I’ve got the full story,” Lexi asked him, as he sat awkwardly on the exam bench minus his pants, “you challenged the Head of Nexus Security to a sparring match?”

Scott grinned, teeth white against his gold-brown skin. “And I won! Not really a fair fight I suppose, given how enhanced I am, and he’s been sitting at a desk a lot and he put himself on short rations during the shortages and never really put the muscle back on, but still, he _used_ to be Special Forces and he’s about two feet taller than me, so… Slightly cool!” He flicked his unnaturally scarlet ponytail.

“And then, being a young man of strong and somewhat peculiar urges, he challenged you to a _friendly_ sparring match, and you said ooh yes please?” _Out of the four Council species, why do_ we _get the slut jokes?_

“Course I did! Have you _seen_ him? …well I said ooh yes please once I figured out what he meant.  
He translated the idiom literally into English so the first thing I said was “didn’t we just have a friendly sparring match?” But yeah…” Scott had gene-modded his eyes scarlet too, and right now they were scrunched up with pride, “it was brilliant! I mean, I was hoping his dick would be a bit more proportionate to the rest of him, every time I’ve seen naked turians before they were in Barbie mode, so I was hoping for some nice ridges or frills or something, or something that inflates and gets stuck, that just sounds awesome from an afterglow snuggles perspective… bit disappointed when it turned out to be the size of my finger, but hey, I like my fingers! But he had an actual pussy!” Dramatic arm waving. “Like how human men have nipples but, er, a bit more so, he said it wasn’t hooked up to anything reproductive and it was just there for fun –”

“ _Scott,”_ Lexi snapped. “I am _familiar_ with turian anatomy. I’m medically qualified in every Initiative species and several that aren’t. And I’ve been sexually active for over a century. And my childhood featured a couple of awkward, sadly unforgettable moments when my parents forgot to lock doors. Get to the point!”

Scott coughed. “Right! So anyway, I got him bent over his desk in his private office –”

“He’s seven foot three!” _Isn’t his groin about level with your chest?_

“I stood on a chair! And I made use of, ah, I don’t know if pussy is exactly the word I’m looking for here, especially as he kept purring while I was doing it, it was awesome, he vibrated! I mean he’s basically got giant kitty claws, and I mean what else has huge scary teeth but is really nice and friendly… and then the locals round here actually look like cats or plushie lions or something, so maybe we should all just quit it with the cat-based euphemisms before something gets mistranslated horribly…” He finally noticed that Lexi was glaring at him. “Anyway! We did that and then snuggled for a bit and had a quick wash and he had to go back to work, and I think he’s given me some sort of alien disease! Look! It’s even itchier than it looks!” He yanked the medbay blanket off his lap.

It looked pretty itchy. His entire penis, and a lot of the surrounding skin, was covered in a violently inflamed lumpy rash with occasional oozing. There was dried blood where he’d scratched off pieces of skin. Lexi felt their copulatory tentacles yank all the way into their sheaths in sympathy.

“ _Scott.”_ Didn’t the human army cover this in sex ed? “Have you seriously never heard of chirality-related allergies?” Why didn’t the human army cover this in sex ed? That was just plain negligent, what with all the shore leave Hierarchy troops running round chasing, well, _mostly_ each other but a surprising number of them wanted to try the squishy at least once…

Scott looked relieved. “Wait. It’s not contagious? Um. Don’t ingest, right? I know I’m allergic to some dextro proteins, but I didn’t ingest anything, honest!”

Lexi shook her head. “Looks exactly like a bad contact-related allergic reaction. Almost certainly not contagious. Very few microorganisms can jump the chirality barrier. Did you…” come on, Lexi, be charitable here, “get very bad high school sex ed?”

“Err…” he was probably blushing, although his skin colour made it hard to tell, “I, ah, can’t remember?”

Lexi decided not to ask further questions. “Hold still and I’ll give you a large steroid injection, and some antihistamines. That’ll sort out the inflammation in a few hours, and the rash will heal in a few days. SAM, can you do anything about the inflammation?”

“I can reduce immune response somewhat,” SAM said helpfully.

“Er,” Scott said, as Lexi rummaged through the drawer looking for human steroids, “I think I skived off a lot of those classes? Or spent them drawing… things… and captioning the things SEXY ELCOR, PHWOAR, and passing them around… I was young and stupid? Younger and more stupid?”

He sat despondently as Lexi injected his left deltoid with the steroids and his right deltoid with the antihistamines.

“Now,” Lexi said, “are you sure you’ve washed your penis thoroughly? Got all the foreign protein off it?”

“…yes…”

“Try not to scratch it, although I realise that’s hard. I’m downloading a guide to safe interspecies sex to your omnitool, and you _will_ read it. It doesn’t have an angaran section yet, so I’m also sending you a translated Ayan high school sex ed textbook, which you _will_ also read. If you and Jaal get any urges involving each other, remember his system’s not used to fighting intergalactic diseases, so I’d recommend avoiding any unprotected mucous membrane on mucous membrane contact in general, and be _careful_ with the bioelectricity before you wind up causing a really stupid diplomatic incident. Understood?”

“…think he prefers Liam…” Scott mumbled.

Lexi copied the documents, sent them to Liam and Jaal as well, and resolved to talk to both of them as soon as possible.

“And Scott?” they added. “I’ll start organising an allergy desensitisation regime for you. It’ll take a few months to work, but I should be able to fix you up so you can do whatever you like with your fellow overenthusiastic young soldiers… or accidentally eat Vetra’s snacks without breaking out in hives, which might be a bigger danger. In the meantime? Wrap it up. Thoroughly. And _definitely_ don’t ingest! That includes spit!”

“Ooh!” he said. “Nice! These Hierarchy soldiers like me, you know, men and women and the rest of them… wait, if the men have, you know, does that mean the women have dicks? Cool! …although some of them are a bit keen on patting me on the head and playing with my hair and trying to use me as a pillow… Just call me Captain Kirk, eh?”

Lexi winced. “Please. Never mention Captain Kirk. I lived on Earth for six years and _most of the people who mentioned Captain Kirk subsequently grabbed parts of me without my permission._ ” Omega’s a jungle, but the predators see an asari and they think _biotic, not easy meat._ Some of the dodgier parts of Earth? Humans get drawn in by the _damn pheromones which don’t have an off-switch,_ and some of them decide that’s an excuse to forget that they’re people and act like rutting livestock!

…They’d actually tried covering themself in pheromone blockers a few times, but they couldn’t stand the stink. And it didn’t even help much!

When they were thirty, their favourite varren had taken to leg-humping. They’d fixed _that_ with a scalpel.

Scott gasped. “That sucks!”

“Ah, don’t worry, they regretted it quickly.” Classic strippers’ trick – if a hand shows up where you don’t want it, focus a few very careful fields and give those sensitive fingertips some thermal burns! “But please? If you must talk about Star Trek, talk about one of the series from after 2050. I know the original series had amazingly good social politics for its era. I’d far rather watch something with good social politics by 2050 standards.”

…If Lexi had their arithmetic right, they’d been born a few years after TV’S FIRST INTERRACIAL KISS!!! Humans had got their act semi-together impressively fast – it probably helped that their WE MUST DO IT THIS WAY BECAUSE WE’VE ALWAYS DONE IT THIS WAY crowd kept dying.

“Ah,” Scott said. “Call me Captain Yang then? You know? The 2101 to 2109 series, with the… giant snake sort of thing and all the flowers… and they had antennae… er, never mind?”

“Scott,” Lexi said, “did you check that Chief Kandros isn’t allergic to levo-protein?”

His mouth fell open in horror.


	2. Chapter 2

The _plan_ was for Tiran Kandros, Evfra de Tershaav, and Anjik do Xeel to discuss troop positioning over videoconference.

“Look,” Anjik said, “the Thaseks and the Ek-ke have been at feud since the Scourge was a maggot. The last murder was twenty-one years ago and the last livestock theft was last month. I agree that they should have quit it when the kett came, but they haven’t and they aren’t.”

Evfra dug his fingers into the soft flesh round his neck. “Are they really that unable to redirect their aggression?”

“Religion, I’m afraid. Most of the Thaseks are enormously keen on the Yaara pantheon, and the Ek-ke _will_ keep ice-fishing so they can eat _jahha_ and you know how some of the more extreme Yaaraites consider jahha to be living gods? And honestly, the Ek-ke’d have trouble keeping themselves fed otherwise, but they just have to make a thing about _these are fish, not gods, we’re proving that by eating them and waving the bones at you…”_ She shook her head. “My third father was a Thasek, technically, but there are reasons he formally switched clans.”

…Neither clan had anything to do with APEX troop movements. Most of Voeld’s APEX missions involved the other continent.

Tiran was intensely grateful that he didn’t have to work with those clans. He’d take Nakmor vs Jorgal any day.

“Jahha aren’t even supposed to be gods,” Evfra declared. “Apart from anything else, that’s entirely theologically incorrect.”

Anjik raised her eyebrows. “In _your_ theology, maybe. Maybe learn to speak Ifaru before you start telling me what I should and shouldn’t believe?”

He folded his arms. “The original prophecies were made in Shelesh!”

“What, and all the non-Shelesh ones are apocryphal, are they?”

Tiran had no views on fish divinity. He decided to surreptitiously check his omni-tool till the other two got back on track.

MESSAGE FROM SCOTT RYDER (PERSONAL ACCOUNT)

ARE YOU OK! I DIDN’T HURT YOU YESTERDAY DID I? I’M SO SORRY! ARE YOU OK?

 _What?_ Had he done something inappropriate with… one of those weird human taboos?

 _I’m fine,_ he sent, _physically and emotionally._

_Well. Slightly bruised. I got out of practice taking massive alien dicks. Need more practice!_

Wait. Was that inappropriate? Oh well – you could trust Scott to say “I’m offended, don’t do that again,” when he needed to, rather than silently resenting things like Addison and Spender.

 _Are you all right, Scott?_ he sent. _Was there a cultural problem?_

Scott didn’t answer.

“First,” Anjik said, “I’m pretty certain Kirrua didn’t actually embezzle that money, and second, even if he did, that casts doubt on the validity of his prophecies but it does _not_ automatically prove that all his gods are false. And third, Serrao was shagging everyone’s wife except his own, mostly without permission.”

“Can you seriously blame him for not being attracted to Greensilver Liha?”

“No, but I can blame him for not divorcing her!”

 _Er,_ Scott sent. _I kind of…_

_You know how I said allergies wouldn’t be an issue? I didn’t actually know what I was talking about. Had a bit of a contact reaction. Nothing major or dangerous. It’ll be fine in a few days. My fault for not knowing what I was doing._

Oh shit… Look, Tiran had heard all the horror stories about someone’s friend’s friend who decided to use their tongue on an asari and wound up in intensive care, and he knew most of them were grossly exaggerated, but still, you ask, right? You ask if they’re allergic, and if they say it won’t be a problem then you assume it won’t be a problem!

 _What?_ he sent back. _Please learn what you’re doing immediately!_

It wasn’t his fault, but he’d injured the Initiative’s best hope. With his genitalia.

Tiran wasn’t into the idea of the Nexus having a spirit. The Kandros family ran with the old ways and the old gods. Even kept up the animal sacrifices (of course, in Andromeda he’d had to substitute carving animals out of jerky and ritually biting their heads off). But he had a sudden vivid mental image of Alec Ryder coalescing out of the beams and wires and plumbing of the Nexus, shrieking “ _You did what to my son?”_

…The next time he saw a shrine with Alec’s face on it, he was leaving some afterlife money.

 _Learning!_ Scott sent back. _Lexi sent me helpful reference texts!_

“Chief Kandros?” called Anjik. “Are you all right? Bad news?”

Of all the impressions he could have made on the Resistance…

“Er,” he said. “Nothing serious. Just an injury report. But that reminds me. Would it be possible for Resistance members to be tested for dextro-protein allergies before they start working with APEX? Just in case they accidentally eat the wrong rations?”

Evfra gazed at him. _No,_ he reminded himself, _those are very big eyes but they cannot see into your soul._ “Hmm,” Evfra said. “I will discuss it.”

“Besides,” Anjik chirped, “now we’ve discovered friendly alien life, it’s just a matter of time till someone fucks it. Young Jaal’s probably got through half the Tempest crew by now, judging by those trashy novels he reads. Sex with someone you’re allergic to can’t possibly end well.”

Tiran’s mouth might have fallen open, but Evfra looked shocked enough that he probably hadn’t noticed.

“ _What?”_ Evfra growled. “We didn’t find aliens that… look like beautiful gender-neutral people except silver with more frills. We found furry monkeys, frilly monkeys that smell nice, stick people composed largely of eyes, _boulders,_ and…” He waved a hand at Tiran. “He has an exoskeleton! I am reasonably certain that the Resistance, of all people, do not wish to mate with aliens possessing armour for skin!”

Anjik grinned. “You didn’t read Jaal’s novels, did you? Or that one he tried to write? Trust me, some people think porn stars painted silver aren’t exotic enough.”

Evfra started massaging his neck again. “I was working with Jaal, not investigating his sexual perversions!”

“And come on,” Anjik went on, “Kandros doesn’t look like a kett to us, not any more. I bet Jaal stopped thinking the Nyx girl looked like a kett a while ago, and he always did like them skinny and good with guns.”

Hmm. They might make a good couple. Vetra always did like them… with a good personality, and preferably not wearing a pressure suit.

…Look, if Tiran wanted Vetra to be his girlfriend, he should have asked her to be his girlfriend, rather than running off after little fluffy things.

Little fluffy things with all their proteins the wrong way round! Aargh!

“Besides,” Anjik added, “for reasons I do not want to psychoanalyse, people write pornographic novels about kett.”

“ _What?”_ Evfra bellowed. “ _Jaal?”_

“No, not Jaal. But it exists. I think it’s a coping mechanism.”

“ _How do you know that?_ ”

“I was online looking for… you probably don’t want to know what I was looking for… and followed the wrong link. Honest. If I was going to write weird alien porn, it’d be something consensual with lots of salarians.”

“Salarians? Is that even possible?” Evfra stared at Tiran.

“Um,” Tiran said. “Salarians… most salarians are rather uninterested in sexual stimulation, but a lot of them will take it if it’s available, and a minority are quite enthusiastic. So, ah, yes, I don’t know if it would be a good idea politically for you to, ah, pursue my salarian troops, but it’s not impossible. Be warned, though – they tend to be _extremely_ cuddly and they can accidentally, ah, look like they’re making advances when they don’t even know what advances are.”

_And they decide to sit on your lap because they’re lonely, and you don’t push them off because it’s cold and they’re running at their usual 42 Celsius and they really do look like they need a hug, and then Addison walks in and gets entirely the wrong idea…_

Evfra stared at Anjik. “They’re nearly all male! I thought you weren’t attracted to men!”

Anjik shrugged. “They all look like cute women, though. Nice and slim with big pretty eyes, and I don’t like dick, well, they don’t have dicks… wait. Er, Kandros? About the kett thing? If any angara approach you sexually… um, if you’re considering saying yes, you should check exactly what they want you to do before you agree to it. Um, unless you want to pretend to vivisect them. I mean, I really don’t want to think about that, but it’s not actually immoral.”

Oh mercy, he hadn’t even considered that! “Thank you for the warning!”

He’d had some _interesting_ experiences with humans. Like that guy who wanted to lick his feet while they were both in uniform. Or the woman who wanted him to shove her around and growl at her and bite her hard enough to draw blood, and normally he was fine with that but she… didn’t quite seem to realise that it was just a game, and she started talking about “the primal instincts of apex predators”… that wasn’t right! But having someone ask him to play sexy kett? Yeah, that’d be a new low.

“Anjik!” Evfra growled. “You’re making us sound like a species of perverts!”

“Species _containing_ perverts. Your species has perverts too, right, Kandros?”

“I think all intelligent species do.” Perverts who accidentally injure unwise mammals… aargh, he probably should give Scott an apology card or something… this better not become public knowledge! “I like to think my own species is particularly good at respecting consent, respecting bodily autonomy… but even if that generalisation’s correct and I’m not just being arrogant, that’s probably more culture than biology.” He was probably being arrogant.

Evfra shook his head. “I believe we were discussing the allocation of krogan troops to the Firehounds Gap garrison. Can we _please_ continue discussing the allocation of krogan troops to Firehounds Gap?”

“Absolutely! So, any krogan who joins APEX has proven they’ve got some ability to forgive old grudges, and that’s an excellent start, but…”

Yeah. _Definitely_ warn the Resistance about dextro allergies, as soon as possible.

And get Scott a very non-specific apology card.

**Author's Note:**

> Unless angara are much more psychologically different from humans than they appear, I'm pretty sure someone, somewhere must have perpetrated the concept of Sexy Kett.   
> ...I apologise for the concept, but it totally exists in universe.


End file.
